


Purple and Red Veins

by Nyx_Fedra



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Badass Rey, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Canon Compliant, Dorks in Love, Ep IX speculation because why not, F/M, Grey Jedi, Kylo Ren Redemption, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Redemption requires a lot of time alone and travel in this case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-12 00:37:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15327885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyx_Fedra/pseuds/Nyx_Fedra
Summary: After Crait, Kylo can’t rule over the First Order, but he can’t go to the Resistance either. He’s lost, again.On the other side of the galaxy, Rey just wishes for him to go to her like she had gone to him.





	1. Ben

After he woke up alone in the Throne Room of the Supremacy, Kylo didn’t take too seriously Hux’s poor attempt at his life, at seizing control of the First Order. All Kylo knew in that moment was the pain of rejection which lit the ambers of his anger and ended with him being overwhelmed by sadness, and pain - again - on his knees in an old Empire Era war room on Crait. Once again, someone he cared about had left him, shutting the hatch of the Falcon and leaving him behind.

Han was dead, but Leia wasn’t, and she had left, _once again_ , on the Falcon with Rey.

It was nothing new.

What was new was the sudden emptiness in his mind, the absence of Snoke’s voice constantly triggering all his fears, scanning for weakness in the back of his mind. Another kind of darkness soon bloomed in Kylo’s mind, it was something that had always been there, different from the dark side, but it took over his mind in a matter of hours.

The first time he was able to think again about what had happened in the Throne Room it was in the _after_ , when Kylo had to get up when the dice disappeared in his hand, Hux carefully looking at his every move, observing how he ordered stormtroopers around, what his orders were. It was in that moment that Kylo understood how totally unprepared he was for the title of Supreme Leader. He had led his Knights, once, but that was a long time ago, before Snoke ordered him to kill them all in one of his tests for him. It wasn’t that he had never given orders, he had, to small squadrons of stormtroopers that were supplied to him from who knows where, but he never grasped the mechanics of it in the way Hux and Phasma had. He never cared.

What mattered to Kylo was being accepted, recognised, Snoke’s training and the dark side, while everything else usually shrieked into something insignificant. Whilst Kylo knew more or less the First Order standing - to bring order to the galaxy - he knew little else about it, about its administration and ideology. He never cared, it never mattered. Kylo took his orders form Snoke and clashed daily with Hux about whatever the man was doing, but he never knew for certain the extent of his command.

‘I’m an Admiral in charge of millions, he’s a childish space wizard with a few crazy followers of an ancient mad religion, he’s just Snoke’s war dog, and a huge maintenance problem with his tantrums’ Kylo had overheard Hux saying this words to Phasma some years before, but he had shrugged them off, used the force to make Hux fall during one of his speeches and moved on.

Now all came back to him. He was Supreme Leader and he didn’t know what to do. In order to grasp the full extent of the mechanics of the First Order administrative and military machine he required time, and someone to help him. Kylo had neither.

So when Hux, a week or so after Crait, confronted him with footage from the Throne Room and his fight with Rey, he had two choices: he could stay and fight for power, or leave and do… something he hadn’t figure out yet.

He could kill Hux. Taking down his stormtroopers and loyal commanders would have required effort, but he could do. It would have required all of Kylo’s power to keep the First order in his grasp and not let other Admirals fight him for power as well, all whilst trying to fill the void left by Phasma in the stormtroopers. The problem was, he couldn’t find in himself to care enough to fight - not for power, at least - not while the footage of him and Rey fighting side by side played in front of him, cutting immediately after the flash of light created by the both of them reaching for Anakin’s lightsaber. To fight for power would have been nothing like fighting with her, he would have never felt the same way.

So Kylo took the recording of the Throne Room and fled with only the clothes on his back and his lightsaber, in the first ship he could get in the hangar before Hux woke up to sound the alarm.

Whilst travelling through hyperspace alone, Ben - because he couldn’t call himself Kylo Ren anymore - kept thinking about the huge fuck up that was his life had been. Perhaps it was because he was thinking of his father, of Han, that he punched in the coordinates for Corellia, landing on the planet and trading the ship for good credits, enough to buy himself a small frighter he could fly easily by himself.

Ben thought about Darth Vader, too, his grandfather, mostly by thinking that it had been a good idea wearing a mask for almost a decade, for no one knew him now but a handful of people. It would change fast once Hux put his face out so that bounty hunters could kill him.

Ben thought about a lot of things while he moved from one world to another, changing ships constantly and sleeping only in hyperspace, where he knew he was alone and there was no chance of waking up to someone trying to kill him, like Luke had.

Firstly, he though about Rey, about how even despite she had said he was not alone, she had left him like everyone else. She had lied like everyone else. Like Leia, and Han, and Luke.

He thought a lot about Han. Ben cried about it for the first time, the pain he hand’t allow himself to feel because of Snoke, the shame and the guilt. He had known the moment he ignited his saber - too late - that he could never truly belong to the dark side.

The force was a nuisance now that he was moving so often. With the absence of Snoke in his mind, Ben understood why Luke had insisted on meditation, he could finally see the full extent of the constant clash of light and dark, and something else, too, an underlying note of balance, growing.

He ignore it, like he ignored the pull of the bond, keeping it close, especially after Hux, a month after his escape, finally put out a bounty on Ben’s head. Kylo Ren and Ben Solo were outed as the same person, as traitors of the First Order, allies of a Resistance which Hux had pursued with little success.

Ben wasn’t an ally of the Resistance, of course. He knew that his mother, Rey… they left him, so they probably wanted him to go back only to sentence him to prison, or kill him, he didn’t know for certain. The point was that no one wanted him because of _himself_. So he kept going, from planet to planet, city to city.

He had the audacity to set foot on Coruscant - only to mess with Hux’s spies -, and then walked the field of green grass where once Luke’s academy stood, the one he had left red in flames, smoke rising high into the sky. Nothing remained of it, only grass and nature covering Ben’s past and his many mistakes, reminding him that, again, he wasn’t welcome, that this was never his home. Home had never been in Leia’s apartment on Coruscant either, nor in the house they used to have in Hanna city on Chandrilia. They were just places where his parents’ argued, where he was left alone with nightmares and droids and people he didn’t know whispering their concerns about him behind closed doors.

It was while he was on Chandrilia that the force, in one of its sick games, allowed Ben to find a recording Leia had made for him when her and Luke’s true parents were revealed. It had never reached him, and Ben watched it several times, but it changed little. Leia’s sorrow at being exposed like that was almost all about herself, by sending him away and constantly whispering about Ben with Han she had given a very clear statement of what were her feelings for her son.

Ben moved, and moved, towards the Core and then the Outer Rim, until one day he stole a ship and set course for Ahch-To. The nuns didn’t like him - not that he was surprised, no one like him, he didn’t even like himself - but he took one of the huts for his own, minding to stay far away from the one Luke had occupied (Rey’s had been destroyed by Luke when he had found them, sometimes he looked at the nuns slowly rebuilding it brick by brick).

Exploring the island slowly, Ben found the old three, burned, and the temple, as well as the cave with the mirror, and Luke’s robes on the stone on which he had disappeared, becoming one with the force.

For hours Ben looked at the mosaic, covered by some centimetres of water, that stood at the centre of the temple.

The dark, and the light.

Balance.

He looked at it for hours everyday for days, weeks, until one day Ben lifted Luke’s old X-Wing out of the water in order to give himself something to do - because the clash of light and dark was beginning to be suffocating, his loneliness and his thoughts leading him to walk always too close to the edge of the high cliffs when there was a storm.

Carefully, Ben began to fix the ship. He needed time to think, to figure out who he was, who he wanted to be now that his mind was finally his own.

Almost.

The war was still raging, but he didn’t know where he stood in it yet. There was one last thing he had to do, and for someone like him - who had always felt the force in his veins as one could be aware of his own blood, since before he could open his eyes to the galaxy - it was something extreme, an act of self mutilation.

It took all the strength he had - he wasn’t sure, but he screamed in pain at one point - but Ben succeed in cutting himself off the force.

 


	2. Rey

In the _after_ , Rey tried not to think of him at all.

Initially it worked, there was simply too much to do for her to think about him, and everyone was as busy as she was, so that there were no questions about why she had shipped herself to the Supremacy.

Jedi stuff, most said, if they said anything.

Then Leia had summoned them all in a war room of the new base, the one they still had to fix enough for it to be described as in ‘working conditions’, even with the constant influx of new recruits. Rey had been as surprised as everyone else when she had seen Hux’s bounty for Ben, for Kylo Ren, who had betrayed the First Order and disappeared. She had thought she would have had to wait more, but she wasn’t complaining.

Her first instinct was to reach out to him in the force, excitement in her veins, because: was he coming to her? But she found a wall at his end of the bond, and all eyes on her in the war room. So Rey had asked for silence, for them all to keep their questions for the end and to just let her speak. They agreed, so she told them _everything_. It was uncomfortable, to share so much of herself, of Ben, with them, she didn’t even want Finn to know certain things, because he wouldn’t, like the others, understand her, not like Ben had, but she had to.

Nevertheless, in the end, Leia’s eyes were shining with hope, and half of the Rebellion was convinced that they were to gain another Jedi. It wasn’t that Kylo Ren’s past was forgotten - not that he had done much, he never committed mass genocide on several planets like Darth Vader had, and even at Luke’s academy the students had been few and some had followed Ben - but the fact that he had killed Snoke and that now he had defected was commonly agree to say a lot about his current character. People could change, and for the better, the Resistance was rebuilding itself on that, especially since First Order deserters began to join them. What Leia focused on, though, was their moment on Ahch-To, in the hut, before Luke interrupted them, a knowing look in the woman’s eyes that made Rey blush hard.

If the Resistance’s acceptance of Ben had been good, the feeling of content it had created in her began to quickly disappeared with each passing day Ben didn’t come to them, to her. There were rumours of him on various planets, and Rey could feel only glimpses of him in the force because of the wall he insisted on keeping up. It made her restless, not being able to talk to him, which she initially found ridiculous.

Only it wasn’t.

Finn was a friend, a dear one, but he had shared friendship and camaraderie with other stormtroopers, so neither him, nor Poe, nor Rose, could understand her loneliness, the way she needed often time alone, her problem with contact. Ben would have understood.

Poe was smart and charming, and without doubts, one of the best pilots she had ever seen, on track to become a good leader under Leia’s watchful eyes. But Poe still saw things too much as black and white, and Rey had lived enough among scavengers to know that human nature was anything but a clear cut of light and dark, even in the extreme conditions of the desert. Plutt had cared about her, in a sick way, the way Snoke had cared about Kylo Ren. So Ben would have understood her questioning of some of the policies of the Resistance.

Rose was a dear friend, kind and charming and sweet, but also determined and strong, and Rey loved their afternoons together fixing ships, she had no complaints and it was nice to bond over mechanics and small talk. Yet, sometimes, Rey declined Rose’s offers to help and just sat alone in the Falcon, looking at exposed wires and wishing for Ben to be there with her, so that she could talk to him too, so that they could be together.

She had reprimanded herself the first time she had thought that, but after a while Rey just accepted that she missed him. He had made her feel accepted, welcomed, wanted, in a way no one ever had.

Leia, whilst strong with the force, couldn’t understand her concerns and feelings of it the way Ben would. Just another way in which she felt his absence, and she pushed it through the bond, hoping for him to lower his defences so to that he could know that she was waiting, that he could come to her with the same trust she had gone to him.

It was unfortunate that she was in the middle of a busy hangar when it happened, when she felt him cut himself off from the force in an act of self mutilation that brought her to her knees.

Had he left her, after all? Was he going to do something stupid and rush? She had glimpsed the way he edged too close to familiar cliffs, and her blood became like ice in her veins. She cared for him so much, she couldn’t stand even the thought of losing him.

There was no easy way to explain what had happen, so Rey faked exhaustion until Leia came into her room, telling her that she knew what had happened. They cried together for a brief moment, trying not to think of the worse, and then, the next day, they kept on fighting the war, because that was what they could do.

With difficulty, Rey fixed the lightsaber, feeling the force inside her and outside of her completely off balance with Ben’s absence, clashing furiously. Hence, it wasn’t surprising that when she ignited her lightsaber - a double edge stuff - what came out was an unsteady stream of white with purple veins which sometimes took over, obscuring the white. The flux of plasma was as unsteady as that in Ben’s saber was, and Rey found herself reaching for him despite knowing better, crying when she felt the void left by him.

The saber was unsteady, but the crackling noise of the blade was similar to Ben’s, and that was enough for her to like it, so that while she fought she could pretend to feel as secure as she had felt on the Supremacy fighting by his side, knowing that he would look out for her as much as she looked out for him, the perfect balance she had felt in the force.

Battles were fought and won, and Rey almost always fought them alone. That was until Hux caught them in a trap, and Rey ended up defending Leia with Finn, Poe and Rose on an open battlefield on a planet not far from the Core, stormtroopers and walkers around them. Too many stormtroopers around them, and backup still too far away.

They were losing, and Rey was about to tell Poe to leave with Leia, secure that with the force she could buy them enough time, when it happened: the legs of the walkers, one after the other, were smashed as if made of butter, the huge metal creatures collapsing on the ground with explosions and metallic noises. The earth under their feet cracked, and then an entire squadron of stormtroopers was sent flying back. Rey tired to look up, but her eyes were fixed on the cracks that now marked the rocky ground they were on, the force suddenly flooding her, only to reach a point beyond the overwhelming, in a peaceful balance that gave her more strength that she could comprehend.

When she looked up, Ben was not far from her, his lightsaber ignited, still crackling, unstable, but not red… it was a flux of white with red veins.

Like hers, but different.

She didn’t know who moved first, or if they both did at the same time but, suddenly, she was in his arms - in the middle of a battle yet safe, _right_ \- the bond finally open again, and while they held each other, they both felt their kyber crystals sing, heal, reach the balance just like they had, until both their sabers became stable, the flux of the blades a clear and steady white for them both.

‘Toopers were coming at them, and Rey looked into Ben’s eyes - like on the Supremacy, like never before, like she would do until she was to become one with the force - realising the same moment he did, through the bond, just how much they felt for each other, and it was not only because of how they kept crossing the galaxy for one another. They felt each other, totally, through the bond, the light, the dark, and the balance they could wield. Then, lightsaber in hand, they turned around, back to back, and they fought, side by side.

It was a great power, that granted by the balance of the force. It became unlimited, unstoppable, when mixed with love.

They won.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/LonelyAsteria) or [tumblr ](https://flaming-starlight.tumblr.com)


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